Communications services, such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony, video conferencing/chat, and unified communications systems often perform poorly due to various problems with the underlying computer network that carries the communications traffic.
In some scenarios, an organization obtains VoIP telephony equipment, or subscribes to a cloud-based service, and purchases phones and installs same in its existing network only to find that call quality is poor, despite having obtained a positive indicator from one of the well know connection speed test sites/utilities. This creates a negative first impression of VoIP services and requires unexpected testing of and improvement to the network, if the organization even decides to keep using the VoIP service.
In other scenarios, an organization that already uses VoIP telephony service begins to notice quality degradation, perhaps due to changes in the network made for other reasons. The organization must then spend considerable resources to test and upgrade the network to return the service quality to its previous level. This can be the case even when a conventional speed test site/utility suggest that the network is performing well.
The same scenarios apply to video conferencing/chat services, unified communications systems, and other audio and video services.
Testing a network to assess quality issues affecting audio and/or video performance is not trivial. Well-known network speed/bandwidth test schemes tend to test generalized data throughput over protocols designed for lossless data communications. These testing schemes are inappropriate for evaluating audio and/or video performance. For instance, it is common for one of these testing schemes to report high network capacity for a network that has poor actual audio and/or video performance.
The failure of known testing schemes to properly account for audio and video hinders the adoption of VoIP telephony, video conferencing/chat services, unified communications systems, and similar, and further makes it difficult to improve the quality of such services where they are already used. As such, improved audio and/or video performance testing is needed.